Dick Francis's Damage (19 page)

W
e took separate taxis to Trafalgar Square and waited patiently among the never-ending groups of foreign tourists.

Crispin was holding the bright orange bag full of cash tightly in his right hand with the Nokia phone in his left hand, while I stood about twenty yards away from him on the other side of a fountain, doing my best to look inconspicuous holding Crispin's battered grip containing the old rugby ball and the tracker receiver.

I had wired us both with microphones inside our shirts and earpieces, mine hidden by my brown woolen beanie, while Crispin's was under his scarf.

We went on waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

It was not until almost two hours later, at a quarter past four, that I clearly heard the Nokia phone beep-beep again through my earpiece.

“Our friend must be watching us,” Crispin said into my ear courtesy of the electronics.

“Why, what does it say?”

“Only one person. The others must leave.”

“He must be guessing,” I said. “He says ‘others,' plural, when there's only one of me.”

“He may have spotted you and then assumed there are others.”

I looked around at the familiar sights of Trafalgar Square and the buildings surrounding it. Could Leonardo be standing on the steps of the National Gallery? Or under the portico of St. Martin-in-the-Fields? Perhaps he was situated behind one of the hundreds of windows facing the square, from the Greek Revival splendor of Canada House on the west side to the Portland stone South Africa House on the east.

I glanced up at Nelson atop his column and wondered if the view was better from there?

“Maybe Leonardo is watching,” I said. “Shrug your shoulders or something as if you don't know what he's on about.”

I glanced across as Crispin placed the canvas bag on the rim of a fountain and not only shrugged his shoulders but spread his hands open and flat in the universal gesture of not understanding.

“That's enough,” I said with a laugh. “Don't let go of that money. Someone will steal it.”

Crispin quickly grabbed back hold of the bag.

“Now what?” he said.

“We wait. He will text again. I'm staying right here.”

I offered to take a photo of a Japanese couple against one of the fountains using their own camera. They smiled for the picture and then smiled again and bowed. And then bowed some
more. OK, OK, I thought, don't make a scene. The couple went on smiling and bowing as I moved away.

The text arrived after another half an hour. I could hear the beep-beep via Crispin's microphone.

“It says I should walk to Oxford Circus. I have fifteen minutes.”

“Go on, then,” I said. “I'll be watching.”

Crispin walked off briskly in the direction of the Haymarket, carrying the bag. I let him go. I didn't need to keep him in view so much as to look out for someone else who might be following him.

If there was anybody, he was very good indeed.

I was almost a hundred yards behind Crispin, as he walked up the hill past the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus and on up Regent Street, and I couldn't spot anyone following.

“Stop a moment and look in a shopwindow,” I said.

Crispin did as I asked.

No one else varied their stride in response—nobody slowed to light a cigarette or moved past him, only then to wait. As far as I could tell from across the street, no one other than me took the slightest notice of Crispin.

“OK, carry on,” I said. “You have no tail.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“I am, rather. I was looking forward to twisting somebody's arm. I was a soldier once, you know. I like a bit of action. And don't talk, just listen. Just in case someone is watching your lips.”

Crispin stopped when he arrived at Oxford Circus and he leaned heavily on the railing around the steps down to the tube station.

“I'm far too old for this bloody lark,” he said, putting a hand over his mouth and breathing fast into the microphone.

The phone beep-beeped again almost immediately.

“Now where?” I asked.

I watched from across the road as Crispin pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket and covered his nose and mouth. “Bakerloo Line to Paddington,” he said quickly, still panting. “Thank God, I'm not walking there. But why didn't he put me on a train at Charing Cross? It's on the same bloody line and was much nearer.”

“Maybe Leonardo doesn't know London as well as you do,” I said. Or maybe he was enjoying just giving us the runaround.

I went down to the tube station using a different entrance from street level but ended up on the same train as Crispin.

I still couldn't spot a tail and I was now sure there wasn't one.

“You're clean,” I said quietly into the microphone. “I'm in the car behind you.”

I could see Crispin through the interconnecting door and I watched as he glanced in my direction and nodded. My examiner in the Intelligence Corps would have had a fit.

I was six people behind Crispin as he ascended the escalator from the Tube into Paddington Station carrying the bright orange bag with its precious cargo.

“Go and take a seat in front of the departure boards,” I said. “It will be easy to keep an eye on you there.”

Crispin went straight over to where I had suggested and found himself space in the second row of red metal seats. I, meanwhile, sat down outside a café, with my back to the wall, from where I had an uninterrupted one-hundred-and-eighty-degree view of the station concourse.

We waited.

And waited some more, while all of those seated around Crispin went off to catch their trains and others arrived to fill
their seats. At one point, I took a complete turn around the station to check if there was anyone else watching and waiting longer than might be expected. There wasn't.

At a few minutes after six o'clock, the Nokia phone beep-beeped again as another text arrived.

“Bloody hell,” Crispin said covering his mouth with his handkerchief. “This is ridiculous.”

“What is?”

“I have to buy a first-class ticket to Plymouth.”

“Plymouth!”

“That's what it says.”

“You'd better do it, then. I'll get one too.”

“Do I get a one-way or a round-trip?” he asked.

“Depends if you want to come back or not,” I said with a nervous laugh.

“Our friend could make me catch a ferry to France from Plymouth.”

“Or to Spain,” I said and heard him groan. “Get a round-trip. The BHA will pay.”

“Not if they're made bankrupt, they won't.”

He walked over towards the ticket office and I followed, keeping him in sight all the time. I wondered if Leonardo had made the buy-a-ticket request just to get Crispin to a certain point in the station where he would then grab the money, so I kept fairly close and alert.

But there was no dash for the cash as Crispin uneventfully bought an open-ended first-class round-trip to Plymouth.

“Have you any idea how much that cost?” Crispin said into his microphone as he turned away from the counter. “Almost four hundred quid. It's scandalous. I could get a chauffeur-driven limo to Plymouth and back for less than that.”

“Wait where you are,” I said, “while I buy mine.”

I used a self-service ticket machine, but it charged the same unbelievable price. Add to that the cost of the tracking device, plus the receiver, and it had been an expensive afternoon for my credit card. I sincerely hoped the BHA wouldn't go bankrupt before my expenses were due.

“Now what?” Crispin asked, again covering his mouth with his handkerchief.

“We wait.”

I could hear Crispin sigh. He was clearly getting fed up with this game. But I thought it might go on for quite a while longer yet.

I remembered one particular ransom drop in Afghanistan that had taken three days to complete, with me and the cash having gone on a tour of most of the southern half of the country before being “dropped” only a few miles from where we'd started.

It was all to do with confidence. Only when Leonardo was confident that he would be able to collect the cash securely and anonymously would he give the final instruction to leave it somewhere.

At precisely seven o'clock by the station clock, I clearly heard the beep-beep of the phone once more through my earpiece.

“It says to get on the 19.03 train to Plymouth.”

I looked up at the departure boards.

“Platform six,” I said, “Go, now. Run. We've only got a couple of minutes.”

I ran ahead of him, through the ticket barrier and along the platform. The guard had already walked the length of the train, slamming the doors shut, as I made it to the nearest one and reopened it.

Crispin followed, struggling a bit, but he made it onto the
train just before the door was slammed shut again and the guard blew his whistle for the train to depart.

We both sat down wearily in the first-class car, albeit in different sections, as the train pulled out from Paddington Station, gathering speed as it rushed westwards through the London suburbs towards the first stop at Reading.

The phone received no further texts until the train had just left Newbury Station almost fifty minutes later, at ten to eight.

“It says I should go to the rearmost door lobby and prepare to throw the bag of money out the window on the left-hand side of the train as soon as I get the next text.”

Bloody hell.

The next scheduled stop for the train after Newbury was at Taunton, nearly a hundred miles away. It would take hours for me to get there and back, by which time Leonardo would have long gone together with the money. He had pulled a fast one. He wasn't on the train at all. He was waiting somewhere beside the line to collect his loot.

“Do we still throw the money out or not?” I asked. “The whole point of offering a down payment was to try and catch him at the drop and that won't now happen. I reckon we should hang on to it.”

“I think we have to throw it,” Crispin said. “In a strange way, we need to develop some trust with our friend.”

Trust? I wouldn't trust him further than I could throw this train.

We went out together into the lobby at the back of the car.

Unlike most of the British railway companies, which had progressed to installing automatic doors, Great Western trains still used the slam-door system, with a handle only on the outside.
The doors were locked shut while the train was moving, but to open a door at a station a passenger had to pull down the window in the door, lean out, and use the external handle.

Crispin pulled down the left-hand window as far as it would go and looked out. I similarly pulled down the one on the right.

The daylight was beginning to fade, but there was just enough of it remaining to see the houses of Newbury give way to the trees and fields of the countryside.

We stood and waited, cold, and with the noise of the train loud in our ears.

My crazy plan of somehow getting Leonardo to take the rugby ball with the cash had gone out the window—literally. Throwing them out together while moving at such a high speed would result in them separating wildly.

“OK,” I said. “Throw the bag out, but give it a good firm chuck or else it will be drawn back under the wheels.”

We stood in readiness, with Crispin holding the phone up to his ear so as not to miss the sound of the text's arrival.

The phone went
beep-beep
and Crispin immediately threw the bright orange canvas bag containing the hundred thousand pounds out the train window.

At the same time, I tossed the battered old rugby ball out my window, hoping that it wouldn't be seen by someone waiting on the other side.

Both of us stood for a moment looking out into the gathering darkness.

“Now what, dear boy?” asked Crispin, pulling up his window.

“Enjoy the journey and get off at Taunton. You then take a train back to London and I'll find a room for the night. There's absolutely nothing we can do in the dark. I'll rent a car and try
to find the rugby ball in the morning. It might tell us exactly where we were when you threw the money out.”

“Right,” Crispin said gloomily. “I'd better call Roger Vincent and Howard Lever. They'll be wondering what has happened. I can't think that either of them will be pleased.”

Rather him than me, I thought.

I looked out the train window into the night that had now completely enveloped us. “Our friend Leonardo has been very shrewd,” I said. “He knew exactly what time of day to stage this stunt so there would be just enough light left for him to find the money but would be pitch-black long before anyone else could get there.”

“He's a clever bastard,” Crispin said, “that's for sure.”

Yeah, I thought, but I could be a clever bastard too.

That was also for sure.

I
stayed the night at the Royal Albion, the first hotel I encountered just a few minutes' walk from the station on the northern edge of Taunton, while Crispin took the nine-fifteen train back to London, muttering about how much money had been wasted in having to get tickets all the way to Plymouth.

“Why didn't he just say Taunton? It would have been half the price.”

I reminded him that he had just thrown a hundred thousand pounds in readies out a train window. That was surely far more important than the four-hundred-pound cost of his train ticket, but it didn't seem to stop him grumbling about it as he hurried off through the tunnel under the tracks to catch the eastbound express with his now-empty grip bashing against his legs.

I was still smiling about it when I checked in to the hotel, declining the receptionist's offer to help me with my nonexistent luggage.

I called Lydia, using the phone in my room. “I'm in Taunton.”

“That was very sudden,” she said. “Any particular reason?”

“I was desperate for some cider,” I said with a laugh.

“Interesting choice. When will you be back?”

“Sometime tomorrow, I expect. Sorry.”

Lydia was used to me suddenly disappearing for a night—or more. Most of the time, I couldn't even ring her to say where I was. It came with working undercover.

“That policeman from Cheltenham, Sergeant Galley, he called the house phone round seven this evening,” Lydia said. “Apparently, he couldn't get you on your cell. He wants you to phone him. He said it was quite urgent.”

I wondered what he wanted.

I looked at my watch. “It's probably too late now. I'll call him in the morning.”

“OK,” Lydia said. “Take care. Love you.”

“Love you more.”

We hung up and I lay back on the bed, contemplating my future.

Lydia and I had used the
Love you. Love you more
salutation for years, almost since we met, and I wondered if it had now become a habit more than a true expression of our affection.

Did she love me?

Did I love her more?

What did love actually mean?

Did it mean I was comfortable in my life with Lydia, because, if it did, then that was fine. I
was
comfortable. And mostly content.

Or did it require a level of steamy passion that should have forced me home tonight because I just couldn't bear to sleep away from her?

I mulled such questions around in my head without coming to an agreeable conclusion. Maybe I was making far too much of the whole thing. After all, we'd had a couple of great nights out recently. But, then again, it took more than that to make a successful marriage.

I snapped myself out of such thoughts, stood up and went in search of some refreshment.

Apart from being the county town of Somerset, Taunton was famous for its Scrumpy, and I went down to the hotel bar to sample a pint of their best, together with a sandwich made from local Cheddar cheese and West Country apple chutney.

I had to admit that the cloudy, strong cider was very tasty, but hardly worth the two-hour train journey from London.

I went back up to my room.

The reason D.S. Galley hadn't been able to get me earlier was that my phone was switched off. It would have been too much of a distraction if it had rung during the drop, and also the cell signal tended to interfere with the communication system I'd rigged between Crispin and myself.

I switched it on and connected to the hotel's Wi-Fi.

The train had left Newbury Station at seven-fifty precisely and Crispin had thrown the bag out the window exactly eighteen minutes later at eight past eight.

Even though our particular train hadn't stopped there, the Wiltshire village of Pewsey had a railway station and, according to the timetable on the Internet, nonstop trains took about twenty minutes to get there from Newbury.

I calculated that the point I was looking for should be just east of Pewsey village. That was where I would start looking in the morning.

—

I DROVE
a rental car from Taunton along the A303 to Amesbury before turning north to Pewsey.

I stopped in the market square beneath the imposing stone statue of King Alfred the Great, the revered Anglo-Saxon king who, in the ninth century, had liberated the English from both the Vikings and the Danes. He is still the only English monarch to have been called
the Great
, even if the epithet was added some seven hundred years after his death rather than by his contemporaries.

I switched on the tracker receiver and held it up, rotating through a full three hundred and sixty degrees. Nothing.

I took Milton Road eastwards out of the village for about a mile and tried again.

This time there was a faint beeping sound from the receiver earpiece when facing to the north. Excitedly, I took the next turn and drove north to a bridge over the railway line, stopping in a small parking lot reserved, according to the sign, for the
Jones's Mill Nature Reserve
. From that point, there was no mistaking the electronic beep. It was at its clearest when I stood on the bridge and pointed the receiver loop along the railway line back towards Newbury.

In the end, it was relatively easy to find the rugby ball with the tracker inside, although I would have to have words with my army friend in the spy gadget shop. The detection range was considerably less than the four miles he had claimed, more like a mile at best. But it was enough.

The bag of money had been thrown off the train as it had passed just south of New Mill, a small hamlet some two miles
northeast of Pewsey village situated between the River Avon and the Kennet and Avon Canal.

The railway ran at this point along an embankment, with the rails themselves some twenty feet or so above the surrounding farmland. There was a good stretch of a couple of hundred yards on the south side with no trees, just a grassy bank. Ideal, I thought, for locating a bag of cash thrown from a train.

In addition, next to the bridge where the railway crossed a country road, there was a cell phone mast festooned with aerials. I looked at my iPhone—five bars of signal.

Remote, but with easy access, and a good cell signal to boot, this place had been well chosen by Leonardo. It was absolutely ideal for the purpose.

I parked in front of a farm gate, clambered over a small, padlocked gate and climbed up the steep slope from the road to the railway tracks, still holding the receiver, which was by this stage beeping away very loudly indeed in my ear.

The battered old rugby ball had ended up between the rails of the London-bound line. As I walked alongside the tracks towards it, I could see it clearly lying up against the far rail. Retrieving it might be another matter altogether.

Trains traveled along this part of the line at very high speeds, in excess of a hundred miles per hour, and they would arrive almost without warning, the noise of the engines somehow appearing to follow on after, rather than precede their arrival.

A high-pitched ringing from the rails themselves gave the first warning that a train was imminent and then suddenly it was upon you, clattering past in a cacophony, before disappearing just as swiftly with the abrupt return to rural tranquility.

An express traveling towards London came sweeping around
the curve at full speed, and I could see the look of horror on the driver's face when he saw me standing alongside the track. I waved and smiled reassuringly, but I saw him reach instinctively for the brake lever as he swept past. I couldn't tell if the train was slowing or not as it disappeared from view around the next curve, still moving at high speed.

There would have been no chance of the driver stopping the train in time, and suicides on the railways were an all too regular occurrence. However, he would most likely be speaking to the police about me via his in-cab telephone system.

As soon as the train had passed by, I nipped onto the track to retrieve the rugby ball, then I ran back towards the bridge and down the steep slope to the waiting rental car.

I spent a few moments looking around to see if I could spot anything that might give me a clue about who had waited here the previous evening to collect a bag of cash. Perhaps if there had been a full police crime scene team available, then plaster casts of footprints or tire tracks in the soft verges may have been an option, but there was nothing useful I could ascertain with just my eyes.

I used my iPhone to take a few quick photographs of the spot, but they were mostly to make sure I could find it again rather than to provide any helpful evidence.

Then I drove away, silently apologizing to all the rail passengers who would suffer delays on their trains over the next hour or so as the Transport Police searched for a member of the public seen wandering on the tracks.

—

“DID YOU
find it?” Crispin asked me when he called that afternoon.

“Yes,” I said. “It was outside a village called Pewsey, where the railway line crosses a country lane. There's no doubt that's where Leonardo collected his bag of loot.”

“How about the Nokia phone?”

“Not a dicky bird,” I said. The phone had remained by my bedside during the night in Taunton and in my pocket ever since. There had been no further texts or any calls. “He must know by now that he's been shortchanged.”

“Perhaps he doesn't want to use that phone again in case we've found a way of setting up a trace on it.”

“Maybe,” I agreed. “He probably bought two of those anonymous pay-as-you-go phones, the one he mailed to us and the other one that he used himself to send the texts. His one is probably at the bottom of the Kennet and Avon Canal by now.”

“So what do we do?”

“Wait,” I said. “He will be in touch, you can bet on it. Has Stephen spoken to his policeman friend yet?”

“Yes, he has. And he will be at the meeting of the Board tomorrow morning at nine o'clock sharp at Scrutton's Club. Howard asked me to tell you that your presence is required.”

“Right,” I said. “I'll be there. But why is it still at Scrutton's?”

“Howard is obsessed with secrecy.”

I thought that rather rich, coming from Crispin.

“What's your wife's name?” I asked.

“I beg your pardon. What did you say?”

“I asked what your wife's name is?”

“What has that got to do with all this?”

“Nothing,” I said with a laugh. “But you're the one who's obsessed with secrecy. I don't even know if you have a wife, let alone her name. You never say anything about yourself.”

“Don't I? No, I suppose not.”

“Definitely not. I only learned that you used to be in MI5 or MI6 due to a slip of the tongue by Neil Wallinger.”

“I'll have to have words with him,” he said quietly.

“So what is Howard so secretive about?”

There was a pause from the other end of the line. I could almost hear the cogs going around in his brain. Did I need to know?

“He, and Roger Vincent, they're both absolutely paranoid about the newspapers finding out and criticizing them or the BHA. They take everything so personally. I think they now wish they had called in the police on the very first day and they're worried they will be thought of as fools for not doing so.”

I reckoned they had good reason to be worried.

“So what did the friendly policeman say when he was told?”

“Oh, he hasn't been told. Not until tomorrow. That's what the meeting is about.”

So it would be yet another day before the police became involved. And, all the while, the trail of the Grand National fireworks would be getting colder and more distant in people's memories.